President Obama used his recent trip to Asia to push through the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the centerpiece of the US rebalance to the region. The US pivot represents a significant shift in the country’s foreign policy and has generated debate in Europe as to whether it should align with Washington or adopt a more autonomous position, considering that Europe too has rebalanced toward Asia in the last decade. The focus of the European pivot both competes with and complements that of the US.

German historian Heike Göertemaker's book, Eva Braun: Life with Hitler, was a best-seller in Germany and has been translated into 15 languages. Göertemaker describes the important role Braun played in Hitler's inner circle, poking holes in the Nazi propaganda that Hitler had been the lonely 'Führer' married to Germany. Görtemaker has traced all the existing pieces of the puzzle of Braun’s story, compiling them into the first academic biography and a very different view of Hitler.

This event highlighted the growing and complicated role of radical nationalist groups in European politics. It focused on the positions of Russian neo-fascist, fundamentalist, and ethnocentrist groups towards the Kremlin's recent foreign and domestic policies, as well as the complications resulting from Ukrainian nationalism in Kyiv's confrontation with Russia.The panel also addressed how Central and Western European populist and far right parties regard the events in Ukraine.

In the second half of the 1980s, the KGB conducted an international disinformation campaign accusing the U.S. of having artificially constructed the virus that causes AIDS at the Pentagon’s laboratory for biological warfare in Fort Detrick, Maryland. On the basis of his research with scholar Christopher Nehring in the archives of the former communist secret police in Bulgaria, Germany, and the Czech Republic, Douglas Selvage will present new details about the disinformation campaign and the key supporting role played by the KGB’s “fraternal organ,” the East German Ministry of State Security or Stasi.

With UN demographers more certain than ever that global population will reach between 10 and 12 billion by the end of the century, the challenge of building a sustainable future seems daunting. But according to Wolfgang Lutz, founding director of the Vienna-based Wittgenstein Center for Demography and Global Human Capital, these projections miss one crucial variable: increasing levels of education.

Seventy years after the Holocaust, anti-Semitism is once again being expressed publicly and violently. Classic anti-Semitic tropes are freely expressed; signs reading “Jews to the gas” and “Hitler should have finished the job,” are common; and Jews have been attacked and murdered. Two panelists will discuss this phenomenon, which is especially prevalent in Europe and the Middle East.

Taking stock of democracy promotion over the past 30 years, what are its strengths and weaknesses? If U.S. and European democracy promotion should be continued, how can it be better targeted and reformed to more effectively advance democratization in post-authoritarian societies? If such assistance programs deserve to be terminated, should there be alternative policies to support human rights and other aspects of pluralism?

Czechs and Slovaks regained their freedom in November 1989 through non-violent protests in Prague, Bratislava, and other towns of then Czechoslovakia. Their Velvet Revolution climaxed a decade of renewed civic challenges to a repressive Communist regime that began with Charter 77 dissidents including Vaclav Havel and accelerated after 1986. Twenty five years after the Velvet Revolution, Europe today is whole and free, but democracy and prerequisite independent media are on the decline in much of the former Soviet Union and elsewhere. RFE/RL, now operating from Prague, VOA, Radio Free Asia, Middle East Broadcasting Network, and Radio Marti, all publicly funded by the U.S. Congress, work to redress the information deficit.